new space program
Mart...@aol.com
space program, complete with two mars Society Convention papers and
some trajectory software downloads.
I am opening a thread to get some discussion underway on this subject.
So far all my attempts to obtain funding for research on the outline
have been unsuccessful. I consider this to be bad management. My
suggestions should have been properly investigated years ago. I have a
certificate of appreciation (1990) from the Stafford committee
substantiating this claim.
NASA should be challenged to produce the best possible program. At
this point, I think there is cause to argue that it has committed
itself to producing the worst possible.
One topic of great interest is whether variable geometry subsonic
ramjets can be used in a two cycle first stage. An email I received
from a participant in the NGLV study suggested that they had considered
ejectors, and rejected them. I had rejected multicyle engines; but a
two-cycle stage has yet to receive proper evaluation, as far as I know
(although the NGLV study apparently gave it some consideration).
martin dowd
Pat Flannery
Mart...@aol.com wrote:
>My website "http:\\www.hyperonsoft.com" contains an outline of a new
>space program, complete with two mars Society Convention papers and
>some trajectory software downloads.
>
>
The hypertext to that site should be: http:\\www.hyperonsoft.com The
quotation marks screw it up. Drawings would help in grasping what the
proposed vehicle are like.
Pat
Mart...@aol.com
There are some sketches of some manned Mars vehicles in the 2003
paper, and a sketch of a "2+2" (as I call it) booster in the 2001
paper.
The latter had large supersonic ramjets on the 2nd stage. Although
detailed studies remain to be done, I currently doubt that the latter
are
useful, and consider the "2+1" to be more likely.
Computer models would be even better, but I need some funding to
do stuff like that and NASA won't give me any.
- martin dowd
bombardmentforce
Try Orbiter
http://spacebombardment.blogspot.com/2005/10/orion-111-for-orbiter-is-out.html
Pat Flannery
Mart...@aol.com wrote:
>Computer models would be even better, but I need some funding to
>do stuff like that and NASA won't give me any.
>
>
Tell them you want to build this:
http://www.milnet.com/pentagon/hyper/v3c12-1.htm
...or if you can get enough funding, this:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/aldbaran.htm
If they say no, then you tell them that they lack the vision that made
NASA great in the old days, and it's very unlikely that Tom Hanks will
ever make a miniseries about the washed-up know-nothings that run NASA
nowadays.
Then casually mention that just last night you and Karl Rove were
talking about the political need to balance the budget, and how NASA
really got going under that womanizing and drunken Kennedy prick, and
that it was probably time that the whole rotten edifice by torn down and
its mission given to Space Command, like Cheney and his neocon
bootlappers suggested in "Rebuilding America's Defenses" and the
classified "Space Exploitation In A Post-NASA Environment" report (wave
black and yellow striped report around, "SECRET" plainly visible on its
cover, and "IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED" stamped on it in red ink with
"GWB" scrawled below it in gold crayola.)
Then state that NASA might get back into the administration's good
graces if they could show some sign that they were still capable of
dynamic vision of even the smallest sort- and that a million dollar
research grant to examine your revolutionary new concepts in space
exploration, as well as a spanking new jet-black Lamborghini Gallardo
5.0 would be cheap insurance indeed to keep their phony-bologna
jobs...which apparently consist mainly of suckling at the government
money teat.
Then storm out of the office while muttering "If they aren't with us,
then they are against us...absolutely goddamned right!" under your breath.
You'll have that grant in no time. :-)
Pat
Cruithne3753
> ...or if you can get enough funding, this:
> http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/aldbaran.htm
Pity about that crummy 3rd generation photocopy, a search for info on
that monstrosity threw up this decent version of that picture (about
half way down):-
Mart...@aol.com
http://www.milnet.com/pentagon/hyper/v3c12-1.htm"
Aerospace planes are more expensive and ungainly than a simple
booster with ramjet assist. I can't imagine why such a vehicle hasn't
been designed long since.
"Then state that NASA might get back into the administration's good
graces if they could show some sign that they were still capable of
dynamic vision of even the smallest sort- and that a million dollar
research grant to examine your revolutionary new concepts in space
exploration, as well as a spanking new jet-black Lamborghini Gallardo
5.0 would be cheap insurance indeed to keep their phony-bologna
jobs...which apparently consist mainly of suckling at the government
money teat."
This is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to avoid. Actual reality,
though, as represented by a rejection letter from NASA headquarters
for a specific subproject, is that althoug my proposal was "ambitious",
it didn't cover topics like "risks, technology challanges,
manufacturing
challanges, radiation hardening".
Science is simple; beaurocracy can sure wear you down though.
Yeah, tell it to the high energy physicists.
martin dowd
Henry Spencer
<Mart...@aol.com> wrote:
>Aerospace planes are more expensive and ungainly than a simple
>booster with ramjet assist. I can't imagine why such a vehicle hasn't
>been designed long since.
Boosters with ramjet assist are more expensive and ungainly, not to
mention less simple, than pure-rocket boosters that do the same job.
Ramjets add substantial vehicle complexity and a lot of design complexity
for the sake of saving a bit of LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in large
quantities.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | he...@spsystems.net
Jim Logajan
> LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in large quantities.
I'd find it useful to know what vendors and what quantities.
Jim Logajan
> LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in large quantities.
Maybe you have gotten quotes for that price, but according to this site:
http://www.astronautix.com/props/loxazine.htm
"The 1959 United States production of high-purity oxygen was estimated at
nearly 2 million tonnes. The cost of liquid oxygen, at that time, ex-works,
was $ 0.04 per kg. By the 1980's NASA was paying $ 0.08 per kg."
Is it possible that you have never gotten vendor quotes but are relying on
45 year old prices? Even about twenty years ago, if the statement on that
URL is correct, NASA was paying roughly double what you claim current cost
is.
I'm now seriously doubt you can supply a vendor's name who would quote
$0.02/lb for LOX in any quantity.
life...@atlantic.net
Jim Logajan wrote:
> I'm now seriously doubt you can supply a vendor's name who would quote
> $0.02/lb for LOX in any quantity.
Pat Flannery
Henry Spencer wrote:
>Ramjets add substantial vehicle complexity and a lot of design complexity
>for the sake of saving a bit of LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in large
>quantities.
>
>
Make sure you contact NASA about that cost estimate, because they are
getting taken to the cleaners in the LOX department then.
Pat
Mart...@aol.com
complexity
for the sake of saving a bit of LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in
large
quantities. "
1. The main advantage is reduced takeoff weight. This reduces
operations costs.
It also makes "exotic" configurations possibly more feasible.
2. A rocket is complicated already. Building one is roughly
proportional
to the mass, according to Whitehead. The dry weight is increased by
the
ramjet weight. I don't have a good figure for this, for a ~150,000 lb
thrust
variable geometry subsonic. I was hoping it would be 3-5 tons. This
would
less than double the dry weight of the first stage. The increased
manufacturing
cost is offset by the reduction in operations cost, in a reusable
booster.
This is an issue which requires a comprehensive analysis. It may well
be
that the ramjets are not cost effective. So lets go ahead with a
traditional
20 ton payload reusable booster (which NASA has at variouis times
considered, under one name the "advanced transfer vehicle"). And make
sure to get it right by producing a preliminary outline of an
integrated
program using it.
- martin dowd
Henry Spencer
Jim Logajan <Jam...@Lugoj.com> wrote:
>> LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in large quantities.
>
>I'd find it useful to know what vendors and what quantities.
Difficult to answer, because the lowest prices come from operating your
own LOX plant. Unlike for most other chemicals, making your own LOX is a
perfectly reasonable thing for a company to do, although it generally
doesn't make financial sense unless you're using really large amounts.
Steel plants using LOX-based processes, for example, have their own LOX
plants. The Cape does not, last I heard.
Fred J. McCall
:In article <1130715194.1...@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
: <Mart...@aol.com> wrote:
:>Aerospace planes are more expensive and ungainly than a simple
:>booster with ramjet assist. I can't imagine why such a vehicle hasn't
:>been designed long since.
:
:Boosters with ramjet assist are more expensive and ungainly, not to
:mention less simple, than pure-rocket boosters that do the same job.
:Ramjets add substantial vehicle complexity and a lot of design complexity
:for the sake of saving a bit of LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in large
:quantities.
But it's not really the cost that's the issue, Henry. It's whether
you save enough mass of LOX on the way up to cover the mass of the
extra system of engines.
I think that one is probably a net lose, too.
Or, if you're going to punt the engines by staging, as it sounds like
Mart is talking about, why hassle with things like aero fields, inlet
designs, etc, when you can just paste another rocket on the back? As
you note, it's a lot more complex. And again, you would have to get
enough better mass fraction by getting your O2 from the air to cover
the added weight of engines, inlets, etc, plus things like inlet drag.
Again, I think that one is a net lose.
It's another one of those nice, sexy ideas that runs afoul of the hard
reefs of reality when it comes to actually building it.
--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw
Pat Flannery
Henry Spencer wrote:
>Difficult to answer, because the lowest prices come from operating your
>own LOX plant. Unlike for most other chemicals, making your own LOX is a
>perfectly reasonable thing for a company to do, although it generally
>doesn't make financial sense unless you're using really large amounts.
>Steel plants using LOX-based processes, for example, have their own LOX
>plants. The Cape does not, last I heard.
>
>
No, it gets trucked in from the Mims Praxair plant, 15 miles away.
Almost unbeleivably, the LH2 gets trucked all the way from New Orleans.
The New Orleans LH2 facility suffered major damage during hurricane Katrina:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/facility/michoud-ap.htm
Pat
Henry Spencer
Jim Logajan <Jam...@Lugoj.com> wrote:
>> LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in large quantities.
>
>nearly 2 million tonnes. The cost of liquid oxygen, at that time, ex-works,
>was $ 0.04 per kg. By the 1980's NASA was paying $ 0.08 per kg."
>Is it possible that you have never gotten vendor quotes but are relying on
>45 year old prices?
No. The US military was paying $81/ton (a hair over $0.04/lb) for bulk
LOX in FY2004. But that's for LOX made somewhere else and trucked in!
The price drops by a factor of 3-4 when you build your own plant
(estimates from Air Liquide and Airco about 10 years ago). LOX is so
cheap to make that secondary issues like transportation can make quite a
difference to its price.
>Even about twenty years ago, if the statement on that URL
>is correct, NASA was paying roughly double what you claim current cost is.
That's because NASA doesn't have its own LOX plants. NASA does *not* use
a lot of LOX by modern standards.
>I'm now seriously doubt you can supply a vendor's name who would quote
>$0.02/lb for LOX in any quantity.
Nobody's going to truck it in at that price, but I wasn't talking about
having it trucked in. If you want *large* quantities, you make your own,
as the steel plants do.
Henry Spencer
Pat Flannery <fla...@daktel.com> wrote:
>>for the sake of saving a bit of LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in large
>>quantities.
>
>Make sure you contact NASA about that cost estimate, because they are
>getting taken to the cleaners in the LOX department then.
No, they're paying about the market rate for *trucked-in* LOX. They don't
actually use enough, given their infrequent flight schedule, to make it
worth having an on-site LOX plant, and that's how you make it cheap.
Henry Spencer
<Mart...@aol.com> wrote:
>"...for the sake of saving a bit of LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in
>large quantities. "
>
>1. The main advantage is reduced takeoff weight. This reduces
>operations costs.
Which operations costs, exactly, does it reduce? Any scaling of ops costs
with takeoff weight is valid only for similar vehicles. But here you've
added the ramjets and all the accompanying complexity, solely to reduce
the size of the LOX tanks. LOX tanks, what goes into them, and the act of
pouring it in, are all really cheap. Ramjets, especially ones that can
run over a wide speed range, aren't.
>2. A rocket is complicated already. Building one is roughly
>proportional to the mass, according to Whitehead.
Possibly -- although that can be argued with -- but that's for rockets.
You can't just blindly assume that rocket/ramjet vehicles follow the same
scaling law. They're a different vehicle type, and will cost more than
pure-rocket vehicles of the same takeoff mass or dry mass. In particular,
most any form of airbreathing propulsion has strong interactions between
propulsion and vehicle aerodynamics, which complicate design a lot.
Rocket engines basically don't care about aerodynamics.
>The dry weight is increased by the
>ramjet weight. I don't have a good figure for this, for a ~150,000 lb
>thrust variable geometry subsonic. I was hoping it would be 3-5 tons.
5 tons would be a thrust/weight ratio of 15:1, which would be remarkable
for an airbreathing engine, even subsonic. I'm not that up on ramjets
myself, but I'm skeptical.
(On the other hand, 100:1 is no big deal for rockets. Using an oxidizer
that weighs over a ton per cubic meter, instead of a couple of hundred
grams per cubic meter [remember that air is only 21% oxygen] makes a big
difference in the weight of the handling equipment.)
>...less than double the dry weight of the first stage. The increased
>manufacturing cost is offset by the reduction in operations cost, in a
>reusable booster.
But why is there a reduction in operations cost, for a more complex
vehicle with more dry mass? You operate the dry mass, not the gross mass.
Joe Strout
Pat Flannery <fla...@daktel.com> wrote:
It might help to get the slashes in the right direction, too. Hopefully
there is more skill in the papers than in the announcement of them.
,------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Joseph J. Strout Check out the Mac Web Directory: |
| j...@strout.net http://www.macwebdir.com |
`------------------------------------------------------------------'
crasus
Henry Spencer wrote:
> In article <Xns96FFDBCF07D...@216.168.3.30>,
> Jim Logajan <Jam...@Lugoj.com> wrote:
> >> LOX... which costs under $0.02/lb in large quantities.
> >
> >"The 1959 United States production of high-purity oxygen was estimated at
> >nearly 2 million tonnes. The cost of liquid oxygen, at that time, ex-works,
> >was $ 0.04 per kg. By the 1980's NASA was paying $ 0.08 per kg."
> >Is it possible that you have never gotten vendor quotes but are relying on
> >45 year old prices?
>
> (estimates from Air Liquide and Airco about 10 years ago). LOX is so
> cheap to make that secondary issues like transportation can make quite a
> difference to its price.
>
Crap..Liquification plants make significant cost recovery from other
gases liquified in o2 processing. Additionally, the capital investment,
environmental and operational costs of such a plant are non-trivial and
profitability is only really achieved in continuous high volume
production. Both of which are problems from a Rocketry perspective.
Perhaps you should save this ignorant crap for american forums where
their likely to believe it. Alternatively, study the new space port
under construction in China for the way it's done in the real world.
Mart...@aol.com
vehicles of the same takeoff mass or dry mass."
There's no sense in arguing. Just spend the lousy few hundred thousand
finding out if you're right. I still say it should be done, because a
new booster is a big investment and comprehensive studies should
precede a choice of overall design. Again, according to Whitehead,
engineering costs for even the most advanced booster are a small
fraction of total costs.
"I'm not that up on ramjets myself"
I'm a computer scientist!
- martin dowd
John Schilling
says...
Actually, if you want to see how liquid oxygen production is done in
the real world, you study the steel industry. They use more of the
stuff than anyone else, and yes, they do make it on-site. Often
by subcontracting the job out to people like Air Liquide or Airco,
to be sure...
The capital investment pays off fairly quickly, the environmental
hassles are a small delta on top of what you already have to go through
to build a spaceport or a steel mill, the cost recovery from secondary
products is often not worth the bother, and LOX can be stored on-site
for a period greater than the usual interval between rocket launches
so as to allow for steady rather than batch production.
And it would be silly to ask Henry Spencer to stick to the American
forums, on account of he is not in the usual sense of the word an
American.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *